I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[MGibster]

Why are we heck-bent on trying to peg behaviors on biology, when culture gives us as broad a palate to work with, while avoiding bad armchair psychologist takes on how biology impacts sentient behavior?

I think there must be something more here. If culture was such a broad palette to work from, then what do we even need fantasy species for? If an elf raised in a farming community is pretty much the same as a human, orc, or dwarf raised under such conditions then what's the point of having an elf in the first place?

 

[AnotherGuy]

So in D&D class affects experience.
The simulationist in me desires a mechanic whereby age affects experience.
The question is then how to balance the long-lived races with the shorter-lived ones.

i.e. 100 year old elf with a 20 year old human

Our currency as it is are languages, skills, proficiencies, feats, species features, background features and attribute points.
What WotC has done for ease is negate its affect as they've done to sex to level the playing field.

With 2024 they've also removed Traits, Bonds, Ideals and Flaws etc so even from that perspective they've negated the affect that age could play in the game.

It's certainly a tricky factor to include from a balance perspective. The earlier editions had a whole bunch of ways to do that but they felt nonsensical from a logical perspective.

Its likely a fool's errand anyways since level advancement is so rapid making the world and the power levels of characters bizarre.
As in why try simulate age when there is so much non-sim already within the setting.

Apologies for the rambling post. Wasn't meant to be one just ended up as one.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I'm not sure how you'd have a framework of rules that don't impose limits, if for no other reason than doing something in a given way rules out doing it some other way.

Even if you have optional rules or other alternatives, using them results in not using whatever rule they replace. Any given decision is necessarily going to have an opportunity cost attached, and any given system of how things work is inherently going to mean that you can't avail yourself of an alternative.

There are limits and their limits. Limits that apply across the board are a lot less onerous then ones that apply to character concepts.
An 18 ability cap is setting a limit that applies to all. It is demarking the scope of the playing field. The -2 strength bonus on a species is shutting down some character concepts. Though again, my biggest gripes is that it is boring because most players will respond by simply not playing that race in a role where str matters.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

One aspect of species I'd like addressed is age.

The USA would have only seen a few elven generations: the ones here prior to 1776, those born 1776-1950, 1950-current. (I'm assuming elves have kids on average at 170yro, which corresponds to a 26yro human). The oldest 1st gen american elves wouldn't reach adulthood until 1876 and likely didn't have kids until the early 1900s, and in 2025 are 250yro, meaning they are equivalent to 30-something humans.

Imagine if your parents were 300+ years old. What kind of assets would they have accrued? How well connected are they compared to humans? What kind of accumulated life learnings would they have?

Now imagine that you were physically mature at 25 but spent the last 75yrs as a "minor" (non-adult) where your parents could manage your finances. What kind of "housewarming" gifts might you receive from parents that spent collecting your nickels and quarters to buy stocks, bonds, land, or just flatware, dishes, furniture, horses, etc?

Of course culture could mean the tween-elf earnings go to the parents, so what if a married couple had a minimal cost laborer for 7 decades?

Gnomes and dwarves would have similar factors but different cultures.

I do not have a good solution but I think that viewing elves lifespans as stretched out human lifespans, makes them ecologically unviable. A elven town could be wiped out twice before it produces a single child?

 

[aramis erak]

I think there must be something more here. If culture was such a broad palette to work from, then what do we even need fantasy species for? If an elf raised in a farming community is pretty much the same as a human, orc, or dwarf raised under such conditions then what's the point of having an elf in the first place?

From my rather cynical viewpoint:

• They allow placing negative traits to see how they affect player behavior
• They allow benefits that are beyond known human limits
• They allow having a suitably morality-free killable foe.
  • When the species is past the point of understandable motives, they make a decent outlet for the PCs aggression.
• They allow trying things that would raise questions if done by humans.
  • Most notable for the tolkienian races, racism within the party.
  • When humans engage in in-species racism, it's usually bad, but it's present in several well regarded games. Most Notable: Pendragon, Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea.
• They allow racists to pastiche a hated culture as grist for the mill by hiding them behind a different body-shape.
• They allow telegraphing a desired playstyle.

I'll note that for some, it's entirely about a body type they lack. What that body shape is varies... One lovely but morbidly obese gal, when playing, always played a small-breasted elf maiden.

For others, its a shortcut for the kinds of stories they want told.

For others still, it's just a bag of bonuses and penalties.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Imagine if your parents were 300+ years old. What kind of assets would they have accrued? How well connected are they compared to humans? What kind of accumulated life learnings would they have?

I mean, I think there's no possible way the culture of elves could be the same nearly-Ferengi human culture you're describing (i.e. the kind that concerns itself with "accruing assets"). Nor I think, given war, disease, monsters, revolutions, apocalypses and so on, would even elves actually be able to hold on to that wealth for hundreds and hundreds of years. Further, even in "elven enclaves" it seems like there's usually relatively little trade in non-perishable goods or resource exploitation (which would make sense).

It's like you're imagining immortal greedy 1800s-2000s humans time-travelling to the 1100s and carefully "accruing assets" like they were vampires planning to live forever.

I think most very long-lived beings probably couldn't live that way, wouldn't want to live that way, would rapidly come to see that such assets are worthless and ephemeral.

Also what connections? Most of their "connections" would be dead. Only other elves and similar, who are presumably pretty limited in number would be a thing - and the whole "all elves know each other" thing has been considered at length by fantasy. Plus just because you know someone, doesn't mean they like you or want to help you. The sort of feuds that could fester for centuries could be staggering.

Accumulated life learnings would be a thing, but again, it'd be complex because they'd have such a wealth of history that filtering signal from noise might be pretty challenging, and a lot of stuff that might have made sense 500 years ago might be outdated today. I think the main thing they'd learn would probably be to live for the now, not to dwell on the past which would lead to stagnation and wallowing, or to obsess about the future, which they'd know was ever in flux (and also tends to get you killed if you get too involved in it!).

I think what you're really pointing out here is that for super-long-lived beings they probably couldn't be very human-like past their first couple of hundred years.

Now imagine that you were physically mature at 25 but spent the last 75yrs as a "minor" (non-adult) where your parents could manage your finances. What kind of "housewarming" gifts might you receive from parents that spent collecting your nickels and quarters to buy stocks, bonds, land, or just flatware, dishes, furniture, horses, etc?

This is a purely 20th century and later thing (or late 1800s at earliest, but even then the vast majority of people didn't live like that). It simply isn't how the world worked before that. Backprojecting it to elves in a quasi-medieval society or the like makes no sense. You're conceptualizing the world elves live in as if it's like, somewhere between the 1890s and the 1940s in the USA, it seems.

Of course culture could mean the tween-elf earnings go to the parents, so what if a married couple had a minimal cost laborer for 7 decades?

I mean, slaves existed. We know how much/little economic impact they had. You still have to feed/clothe/house them, especially if you like them. No married couple got rich off a single unskilled slave. There's a reason people trying to make money off slaves, whether in ancient Rome, or the US pre-Civil War South, usually needed to have quite a lot of them. Otherwise they're basically just cheaper servants, and overall exert an economic cost, rather than making you money (with rare exceptions like highly skilled slaves - but historically they tended to get paid themselves and sometimes quite well!).

You seem to be thinking this is capitalism and this would just be a nice little guy making gold coins appear in your pocket. Unlikely. Elves aren't Ferengi. People don't generally keep personally scrabbling for wealth when they don't need to (greedy billionaires aren't scrabbling, note - most of them are pretty lazy and it's just wealth begets wealth under modern free-market globalised capitalism - but fantasy settings generally aren't under free-market globalised capitalism, they're under pre-capitalistic situations). More likely long-lived elves quickly realize how futile and grim that is, and what really matters is living life.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

A major issue here is that the "race" we think of for humans is, biologically speaking, pretty much nonsense. We have been taught that people with different skin colors and small differences in facial features are a different "race", and we attribute all sorts of differences to being of different races, with no actual biological differences behind that. For humans, "race" is a social construct.

When elves, dwarves and humans were described as races, I could understand the reasoning. But if they are defined as species, they can be as different as chimanzees or fruit fly. Saying "race X is inherently stronger and stupider than the average human" may evoke bad things to some people whose ancestry was described by racists as a race inherently stronger and stupider, but we're speaking of species. I don't think it applies. When we speak of species, saying "Adult gorillas are stronger and less intelligent than humans (despite their young developping quicker)" isn't associated IMHO with the kind of racist propaganda you're refering to.

Why are we heck-bent on trying to peg behaviors on biology, when culture gives us as broad a palate to work with, while avoiding bad armchair psychologist takes on how biology impacts sentient behavior?

That's a good question, but all the culture we're dealing with are the product of our biological limitations. I am not certain our architecture would be the same if we were able to fly, for example. Or our most common cultural trait, around funeral and death, would be widely different if we were immortal outside of being violently killed and had just a craving to go the West.

Most of the tool we use are adapted to human use. We never developped 4-weapons fighting style, and barely developped 2-weapon fighting because we mostly lack the coordination to use two weapons effectively. Having a penalty for using two weapons is a human bioessentialism. There is no reason a fantasy species of octopi couldn't be able to use its eight tentatcles effectively simultaneously and have a natural trait "You don't have penalty for multiweapon fighting, have your 8 attacks per round at level 1 or carry 7 shields for +14 AC". I don't have a problem with human having a handedness as a genetic limitation, and two-weapon fighting incurring a penalty.

It would need to be treated appropriately within the rules, of course. To use D&D as an example, if humans are 10 and gorilla are 16, that means that 16 (+3) is 10 times the strength of a regular human, something Samson-like. 18 is Heraklès holding, although briefly, the weight of the sky on his shoulder (though one could argue that Heraklès was no longer level 1 at this point and had the opportunity to get an ASI to 20). If your average blacksmith has STR 16, you can't really stat a gorilla-like species.

[A problem I have with INT for villain. I see Einstein as INT 12 or maybe INT 14, and I absolutely am unable to imagine how an INT 20 creature would think. They'd be as removed to humans as a fruit fly trying to understand our thought process. But that's more of a problem of the stat's definition].

 

[aramis erak]

I do not have a good solution but I think that viewing elves lifespans as stretched out human lifespans, makes them ecologically unviable. A elven town could be wiped out twice before it produces a single child?

Humans are capable of procreation at age 12, relatively safe procreation at 16 with a typical 4-score and 10 for the eldest... 90 years.
If an elf lives 300, that's 3 ⅓x, so 12 * 3.33 = 36+4 = 40, relatively safe at 53.

If we use 55 as the safe breeder age, and 300 as the meadian age of death, with 50 years between, that's 4-5 kids, more than plenty for reproduction.

Different games, settings, books, comics, have different multipliers. ElfQuest, death from age simply doesn't seem to happen... except maybe WolfRiders and Sea Elves.

 

[Mr. Lahey]

One aspect of species I'd like addressed is age.

Imagine if your parents were 300+ years old. What kind of assets would they have accrued? How well connected are they compared to humans? What kind of accumulated life learnings would they have?

Interesting, but when I look at age, I think of different things. I cannot imagine that longevity would not change how you think of the world.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Interesting, but when I look at age, I think of different things. I cannot imagine that longevity would not change how you think of the world.

That's another aspect of bioessentialism that isn't really adressed. We tend to consider many species as if they could develop a relationship to existence that would be humanlike, despite living 5 minutes* to eternally. We don't have cultural reference because all the culture we know tend to live 50-100 years. "Sure, I fell in love with that human. That was nice, but well, she died 60 years after that, and that's was my 7th wife. Now I am on tindelf again -- it's great to be a young adult!" (let's not delve too deeply into cross-species intercourses, it gets icky to think as Arwen and Aragorn not as an interracial couple but as an illustration of "zoophilia" (for lack of a better term).

* Some combinations aren't compatible with adventuring, though.